Context-awareness: a key enabler for ubiquitous access to manufacturing knowledge

Recent visions for the factory of the future highlight the importance of integrating the pillars of Knowledge Management (KM) in the whole manufacturing divisions involved in the product lifecycle development. The increasing usage of ICT tools in the factory coming with the digital (PLM, ERP, MES, etc.) and smart (IoT, RFID, Wi-Fi, etc.) manufacturing paradigms contributes to this vision with the aim of supporting factory workers in conducting better production outcomes. However, this expansion results a data and information overflow making the handling of the access to the exact needed information more and more complex. This fact explains the need for a contextual access to the information and more generally to the knowledge set in the factory. Based on some fundamentals derived from ubiquitous computing paradigm, this paper proposes an approach to handle contextual access to the manufacturing knowledge.